Fingerprinting has been and continues to be a common method used by governments and law enforcement agencies to identify individuals. Typically, forensic fingerprinting has involved taking a physical print of the ridges of an individual's skin surface using ink and paper cards. The paper cards can then be archived for comparison to other fingerprints (e.g., latent prints collected at a crime scene).
In recent years, the number of individuals being forensically fingerprinted has quickly grown. One reason for this trend has been a focus on global counter-terrorism and increased world-wide immigration, which has given rise to massive global people-tracking databases. Another reason has been government mandated moves by many industries to begin keeping forensic quality prints of their members. For example, forensic fingerprinting has begun to be required by groups within brokerage industries, legal services industries (e.g., lawyers), education industries (e.g., teachers), banking industries (e.g., bank employees), mortgage industries, and others.
In the context of this quickly growing demand for forensic fingerprinting, traditional ink and paper processes are becoming cumbersome and inefficient. As such, there has been a shift toward digital fingerprinting and archival. For example, paper cards are being scanned, or fingerprints are being collected by electronic scanners, and the data is being digitally stored for archival and processing. Stored data may then be used by systems, like automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS), to assist with background checks, law enforcement, etc. Despite these advantages, fingerprint collection systems often cannot reliably and consistently acquire forensic quality fingerprint data. Current digital fingerprinting techniques encounter a difficult to collect print with about one in five people.